Investigating the Relationship Between SLOC and Logical Database Measures to Improve the Early Estimation of Software Cost

Abstract

Project planning is a critical activity in the software development life cycle. At the early stages of a project, the managers need to estimate required time, effort and cost to plan, track and then to deliver the project successfully. Many studies have attempted to provide methods for precise software cost estimation. The current software cost estimation methods are mainly based on software size estimation and functional system requirements. The main assumption of this study is that, as the primary source of complexity in today's software is the interaction between the database and the user, database measures may provide inputs allowing current software estimation methods to achieve more accurate results. Accordingly, this study attempts to gain insights from objective measures, collected through the logical database model of software systems, for better prediction of the software's effort and hence cost through software lines of code (SLOC) measure. For this purpose, more than 2.5 million lines of code developed by four different companies, for 79 different software packages with their related database design measures, are analyzed. The results of this study show that there is a close correlation between the software size and database design measure, namely, the number of tables which can be collected at the logical database design stage. By adapting this result, the current estimation models could be improved significantly.